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Comment by tedunangst | Hacker News Reader

> In 2008, Blizzard released an intentional plague in World of Warcraft to echo the success of the Corrupted Blood pandemic. [...] Blizzard put a stop to the Lich King plague on October 28 after receiving complaints from players that the zombie infection was detracting from other parts of the game.

Takes a few tries for the lesson to stick.

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But there's the rub. Some of the population hates these kinds of events, and another portion love it.

Is there "Griefing potential"? Yes, there is. But, man, the game is so mundane and routine the rest of the time, why not mix it up a little?

They brought this back at the end of Battle For Azeroth, during the end of expansion event. Players could become ghouls and infect other players. You'd see them lingering and lying in wait when bosses would spawn in Ice Crown, then shenanigans ensued.

They also did this back in Mists of Panderia, and not just for a short time, but it was end game content where you could use an object and become a hostile PVP player to EVERYONE, not just the other faction, even on PVE servers. Did the griefers have a field day with that? Yea, for a short time. More reason for the "citizenry" to posse up and beat the ne'er do wells back.

But there were always those that complain. "This happened and inconvenienced me".

I'm sorry. BFH. TDB. Boo hoo. Too bad. That game is playable that way the other 100 weeks of the expansion. There's lots of players, lots of playstyles, every decision Blizzard makes is a bad one in someones eyes. So, lighten up and let others have a turn.

> They also did this back in Mists of Panderia, and not just for a short time, but it was end game content where you could use an object and become a hostile PVP player to EVERYONE, not just the other faction, even on PVE servers.

This event was a callback to one of my favorite griefing exploits of vanilla WoW.

There used to be a Horde-only quest called “Test of Honor” in one of the mid-level Kalimidor zones. Most players would just finish the quest and carry on with levelling - but, in the rare instance where the player FAILS the quest, they get hit with a several hour long debuff called “Mark of Shame” that flagged them as hostile-on-attack to all factions.

This meant that players with the debuff could still safely move around inside Horde capital cities (though they couldn’t interact with NPCs) but if any “friendly” player was unwise enough to try attacking them, they’d immediately be swarmed with lvl 60 elite Horde guard NPCs.

By the time Blizzard removed the debuff, the griefing meta was to level a Tauren (largest hitboxes), get the debuff, and then either camp on top of the Org mailbox or clip through into the back of the Auction House and sit on top of the auctioneers. Any player attempting to check their mail or auctions would muscle-memory right click, which caused an auto-attack on the debuffed griefer, which shortly resulted in a trip to the graveyard as the elite lvl 60 NPCs would spawn to rock your world.

We had gimmick guilds like <On Strike> where the characters were named AuctioneerX to prevent savvy players from using the /tar Auctioneer command to bypass the hitbox.

Ah, those were the days siiip

As I recall, by far the most vocal opponents of the BfA version of the event were players who sat at the auction house at all times, constantly buying, selling, and relisting auctions. Some of them had to be botting with how long they stayed logged in.

Some other groups also weren’t happy but managed to figure out workarounds.

It was a deeply divisive event - for a very large fraction of the playerbase, it was the most fun they've had playing WoW. The entire way the game functioned changed for a week - some people set out to grief, others worked to try to cure people infected. And it was done just before the release of a new expansion - any gear or progress that occurred in that week would be invalidated two weeks later when the new expansion raised the level cap by 10 - all of the best equipment you could earn prior to the new expansion would be replaced by normal leveling gear. The game was, so to speak, in a lame duck state at the time, so why not have some fun with it?

As a priest (on an RP server, no less) I played it straight: Doing my best to combat the plague and cure the sick before they could turn. But once I was turned? Oh it was on, give me a bite of your brains! Great fun.

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